The Negro Repertory Company (NRC) was established on October 27, 1936 by Florence and James Burton, directors of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse (SRP), as the Negro unit of the Federal Theatre Program, a part of the WPA. In its short life it produced ambitious and controversial plays that reached a wide audience of whites and blacks. Most plays were adapted to included songs and a chorus that the James’ felt appropriate to the “negro method of expression,” and their use of mixed race casts seemed to have few of the problems that plagued the other 13 Negro units nationwide.
Their inaugural performance, a musical adaptation of the play “Noah,” was well received by critics and audiences alike. Their second production, “Stevedore,” a mixed-race, “agitprop” play encouraging unionization of black and white workers, opened during a waterfront strike. Longshoremen bought out the house and were so involved with the play that some jumped on stage to help actors erect barricades. Their third, “Swing Gates Swing,” was written and scored by the NRC. Their final show of 1936, an adaptation of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” opened with a cast of 50 performers and a wildly appreciative audience of 1,000. It was closed the following night for being “immoral, indecent and bawdy,” but it seems private theatre owners put pressure on the FTP to close a surefire hit which threatened their profits.
Before the NRC was abolished by Congress in 1939, they had mounted 15 total productions including an African American version of “It Can’t Happen Here,” a play based on Sinclair Lewis’ anti-fascist novel of the same name that opened on October 27, 1936 in eighteen cities across the country. In mounting shows like “Androcles and the Lion” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” among others, they utilized five percent of the African American population of Seattle as paid actors, technicians and volunteers. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence
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This note was written by a child who was listening in on a bunch of artists discussing art and life.
Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit
“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.
In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.
…
When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.
Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.
The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)
All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.
Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.
But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”
For anyone else curious, this is Walnut (from his instagram @ shamblanderson)
what d&d spell do you wish you could use in real life and why is it prestidigitation?
No. No, listen. Listen to me. Shut up about 'fireball'. If you're really that interested in arson, download the anarchists cookbook, coward. And shut up about teleportation, none of us asocial inside kids is prepared to deal with the consequences of a mishap, which will DEF happen if you use it frequently.
You know what has no chance of mishap and all chances of convenience? Prestidigi-fucking-tation.
Do you hate doing dishes? Poof. Every dish in a 5 foot cube is now clean. Even if you hardlined the rules as only applying to individual objects, less than 6 seconds to clean your curry tupper ware without getting those weird stains on it is worth it. never have to run a dish washer, never be without your favourite mug. And that's just dishes.
Hate laundry? Boom. You can just clean your clothes immediately after taking them off at night. Hate putting on your fitted sheet? Boom. Don't even take it off the bed. Your sink? Bathtub? Toilet? all of these things can be cleaned instantly and without needing any electricity and water guzzling machines. You can even do it on the go- stained your shirt? No you didn't. Sweat through your shirt? No the fuck you didn't. When you have prestidigitation, you are perpetually impeccable.
But wait, there's more! Prestidigitation doesn't just clean! Did your tea go cold? Boom, heat it up. Forget to put your wine in the fridge? Boom, now it's cold. Do you hate how water tastes? Boom- now it tastes like whatever you like. You will never again be forced to suffer a taste you don't enjoy with this one neat trick, because prestidigitation is technically like 5 tricks rolled into one convenient spell that is both practical and flashy.
Light candles with a snap of your fingers for dramatic effect! Conjure scissors from thin air! Create ominous whispers to follow you as you walk past your enemies! Leave a message on the wall that looks like dripping blood to remind your spouse to give the dog it's pills! Make an illusion of what haircut you want at the salon! and do all of that as many times as you want because we are cooking with cantrips baybe! You can even have multiple effects running simultaneously! The possibilities are as endless as the time, money, and frustration it will save you!
No other spell will give you more bang for your buck than prestidigitation. It is The spell, and every day it continues to be not real is a day I weep. I want this. YOU want this.
Presti
digi
tation
Ok but subtle spell catapult to gaslight people into thinking you have a ghost.
Or mage hand similarly
My dear you do not need magic to be a real life scooby-doo villain. You can do that with some gumption and basic stage production. But only magic can extricate us from the Sisyphean hell of laundry and dishes.
the cunt who makes my life decisions (me) and the idiot who has to live with them (also me) somehow have diametrically opposed world views how am i supposed to live like this
"you did this to yourself" if only i knew why. if only i fucking knew why
STOP. moment of gratitude for those precious times of breathing from your nostrils when you don't have a stuffy nose